This disclosure relates to security provisioning.
The prevalence and accessibility of computer networks requires security measures to protect valuable information. An enterprise that implements the security system can require a user to be authenticated and authorized before using the network.
One way of tracking an authentication status of a client device is to use cookies. Cookies allow a state to be maintained in a client browser, but are limited to domains for which the cookie is defined. Additionally, cookies for a specific browser are stored in a browser specific location for the browser. Thus, if a client device has more than one browser, the authenticated state in one browser is not conveyed to the other browsers.
Additionally, to provide the cookies through the HTTP mechanism, it is necessary to create authorization cookies for every new domain that is visited by the user, and to create an initial authentication cookie. Propagation of the initial authentication cookie and the domain authorization cookies for each domain may involve a number of HTTP redirects. It is desirable to minimize the number of redirects.